The following is a talk that was given on April 11, 2017 in Thom Donovanâs Critical Issues class at Columbia University, New York, New York:
The first corpse I did not see was my grandfatherâs. This is where I always start. Because it was not until I did not see my grandfatherâs corpse that I learned, or discovered, that NOT seeing a corpse is importantâarresting, sometimes even debilitating.
This is my grandfather, my motherâs father. I have a Japanese grandfather, and a non-Japanese grandfather. This is my non-Japanese grandfather. This is a picture my mother took right after my grandfather died. In other words, this is a picture of my grandfatherâs corpse. I have seen it, even if through the medium of my mother. I am seeing it now.
This is not, therefore, the corpse I have not seen.
His corpse did not linger. Nor has it had much of an impact. Not yet, anyway. He died in October. After he died, I tried to imagine his naked corpse. I tried, and it was surprisingly easy. I could see it. I could make it out.
Then he was cremated and thrown into the ocean.
My other grandfather, my fatherâs father, my Japanese grandfather, died in 1996. His was the corpse I did not see. I have also tried to imagine his naked corpse, but have failed. It has been surprisingly difficult. I cannot see it. I cannot make it out. His nakedness is fugitive, evasive. His nakedness baffles me. Baffles, as in: mocks and misleads me. Baffles, as in: I am hoodwinked by his nakedness.
I did not see either of my grandfathers naked when they were alive. I cannot claim the image of their nakedness as an influence. Unfortunately.
I did not see my Japanese grandfather die. I did not see him dead. And I did not go to his funeral. He was also cremated. We scattered his ashes in Death Valley. Here is the hill where we scattered his ashes:
I buried a copy of my third book, O Bon, on that hill.
O Bon is a book of poetry:
It was one of many attempts to construct an altar for my grandfather. A space to which he could return. And where I could meet him. O Bon: when the dead return to earth.
I wrote the poems at night while falling asleep. To enact the sensation of sinking through the bed, through the floor, into the ground, to commingle with what has been buried. Subterranean language, subterranean understanding, I thought. Because: I harbor the idea that some part of my grandfather has maintained sentience and understanding, and even the ability to read, and that it exists in the currents of a subterranean spring. Â
So as my family was walking back down the hill in the Death Valley, I dug a hole. I placed O Bon in the hole. And thought: Now he can read what I wrote.
Here is some background on what I wrote and what I write: I have been writing a book about my grandfather for seven years. Not that long, but long enough for it to have started feeling absurd. Absurd and overgrown: weedy, unwieldy, and ultimately incoherent. But maybe, more optimistically: open.
The book is called The Grave on the Wall. There are many reasons for that title. One of which I will show you.
I am also writing a second book about my grandfather, but this one focuses on the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. It is called Dementia. And it is, in many ways, a rewriting of The Grave on the Wall, even though The Grave on the Wall is not yet done.
My writing in these books, as well as in my poetry, has been, so far, an attempt, often thwarted, or generally failed, to recover my grandfatherâs corpse. To put it another way: I write because I did not see his corpse. To recover my grandfatherâs corpse and restore it to a place in which for him, history isâto quote Hannah Arendtâno longer a closed book.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had seen my grandfatherâs corpse. If I had seen his body before it was cremated. What would have ended there? The subjects about which I write most often and obsessively are those that escape me, are those I have missed.
The open book: sentenced, by my own absence, to a kind of indentured repetition.
Here is some background on my grandfather. He was born in a small village on an island off the coast of Hiroshima. 1910. He immigrated to the United States in 1919. Nine years old. Three weeks on a steamship. The Africa Maru:
Alone: his family was not with him. He was surrounded and cared for, instead, by dozens of young women who were going to the United States to meet their husbands for the first time. Japanese picture brides.
Here is the cover of O Bon again, this time without the text. It is a drawing by Manabu Ikeda, titled Regeneration:
My grandfather died in North Carolina. 1996.
A month after he died, and a month before his ashes were scattered in Death Valley, he visited me. It was morningâI was alone in the house I grew up in:
This is what happened. It was 8 in the morning. I was sleeping on a couch. There was a crack of thunder followed by a surge of lightning. I woke up. Every light in the house was on. Except, I noticed, the hallway was dark, which was also when I noticed that there was a man in the hallway. He was reaching the top of the stairs. His body and head and hair were black, like a shadow, yet corporeal. He looked like he had been charred. Completely. He was ashes. I recognized him: my dead grandfather.
Seeing my dead grandfatherâs ash-incarnation was like wish half-fulfillment. It required belief for me to say that what we scattered a month later in Death Valley were my grandfatherâs ashes, and not, for example, the relics of some effigial sacrifice.
Funus imaginarium: a burial in which an effigial body, or an effigy, is used in place of the actual body. Like a surrogate. Because the actual body is INDISPOSED. Burial, therefore, as ritual, as performance. As a matter of imagination, of belief.
My grandfatherâs name was Midori Shimoda. Shimoda means: lower rice field. Midori means green.
This is a photograph of my grandfather taken in 1943. It was taken by a photographer named Peter Fortune. Peter Fortune was commissioned by the Department of Justice to document life in the DOJ prison in Missoula, Montana. Fort Missoula. It was originally built to protect settlers from the indigenous people, the Salish, on whose land they were occupying. Fitting place for a POW prison. It was also an interrogation site. The prisoners included 1000 Japanese immigrants who were being held on suspicion of conspiring to carry out Fifth Column terrorist acts against the United States. All the prisoners were men, all in their 50s and 60s. My grandfather was one of them. He was the youngest: He was 33.
I lived in Missoula for four years. My first day in Missoula I went to where the prison had been. One of the barracks remained. It was turned into a museum. Small town museum, with pitiable life-size diorama-like reconstructions of prison life, front pages of newspapers on the walls, indefensible haiku, boilerplate photos of Japanese American families, dressed up and tagged, among piles of luggage, waiting to be taken by train into unknown America.
I recognized the manâs face. But it was that kind of uncanny recognition that registers first as nausea.
My grandfather died eight years earlier. And now he was on a wall in western Montana. What was he doing? My grandmother didnât know. My father didnât know. No one knew.
This, I said to myself, is a photograph of my grandfatherâs corpse.
Actually, I said that later. What I said at the time was:
This is a photograph of my grandfatherâs grave.
Actually, I didnât say that either.
I started crying, then called my sister.
But I say that I said corpse and then grave, because: the photo illustrated a moment in which my grandfather was undergoing a vital transformation. Not the bra and slip, although there is that, but his transformation from Japanese immigrant, Japanese national, to American citizen.
While in prison, he was interrogated by the FBI. They questioned his loyalty to the United States, a country of which he was neither a citizen nor eligible to become one. He was, therefore, not obligated to be loyal, in any way, save for by the dictates of the United States. Asian immigrants were not, in 1943, eligible for citizenship. They had never been eligible for citizenship. Only the American-born children of Asian immigrants were eligible for citizenship. It would be another nine years before Asian immigrants were eligible for citizenship.
And yet, he, with every other Japanese immigrant, as well as every Japanese American citizen, was forced to pledge his allegiance to the United States, or risk deportation. In order to pledge his allegiance to the United States, my grandfather had to simultaneously renounce his allegiance to Japan. And so he became: stateless. Citizenship was staged as a way for my grandfather to pass from statelessness into state-sanctioned identification. To become a citizen:
Or, in Agambenâs words: an immediately vanishing presupposition.
For the immediately vanishing presupposition that is the citizen, both the pledge and the allegiance, in the pledge of allegiance, are euphemisms for: assimilation.
But assimilation is a non-reciprocal, unrequited affair. It is not synonymous with integration. It does not denote a fair exchange. There is no compromise. An immediately vanishing presupposition is either incorporated, or suspended.
My grandfather told the FBI that he believed Japan was HELL. He said, I donât want to go back to Japan and I wish that they would give me a gun to go and fight Japan. In other words, he did not want to go back to Japan, but he would if given a gun.
This is the moment, for me, in which his corpse first started to show through his skin.
The FBI continued to check up on him for ten years after the war. They visited his photo studio in New York City, Bryant Park, southeast corner, every year, for ten years, until 1955, which was also the year he became a US citizen.
His corpse and its burgeoning production were manifold.
He had Alzheimerâs for 15 years. This is when I came along. As I was beginning to form my sense of reality, he was troubling it. Everything about him was mysterious and strange. But also: he was the only person in my family who, maybe because of his deepening dementia, made sense, and with whom I connected. He introduced me to mysterious and strange conceptions of time. He overlapped landscapes. He looked out a window in North Carolina and saw, for example, the streets of Los Angeles. He saw people that were not there and did not see people who were. He called people the wrong name. He wandered into the woods and got lost. He sang to animals, etc. He was to me and my young mind the quintessential storyteller. I did not realize then that the magic I perceived was in fact a manifestation of a degenerative disease.
The only thing I remember him ever saying about Japan was this one memory he had of growing up in Hiroshima. The memory, in his voice, was this:
When my grandfather died, I washed the feet of his corpse.
By the way, many people, including Japanese American citizens, refused to pledge their allegiance to the United States. Which means also, because of the traditionally coercive nature of American false dichotomies, that they were implicitly refusing to renounce their allegiance to Japan, even where there was none. This is true even of Japanese Americans who had never been to Japan, who knew very little about it, and did not speak Japanese. They resisted the loyalty question altogether.
Some of the camps and isolation sites functioned specifically to incarcerate people who refused to pledge allegiance. They were chained and transported in the backs of trucks even further into the infernal desolation of unknown America. Their barracks, their rooms, their cells, got smaller, they shrank, they were basically boxes.
Did anyone read Rachel Avivâs article in the New Yorker, The Trauma of Facing Deportation? Itâs about a Russian refugee, a young boy in Sweden, who, upon learning that the Swedish Migration Board has rejected his familyâs application for asylum, falls into a coma. Not a coma, exactly, and this is important: he is awake, just completely unresponsive. His name is Georgi. Heâs incapacitated for a year. He doesnât leave his bed. He eats and drinks through a feeding tube in his nose. His classmates come to visit. They come to visit, what? His body? His face? More or less a big stuffed doll version of their classmate Georgi? An effigy of the person they once knew ⊠They stare at his face, into his eyes, like heâs underwater, floating. His face is a sundial. They watch the hours pass in shadows. He doesnât respond. He is one of many hundreds of refugee children who have also fallen into this ⊠trance, this state of suspension. The Swedish call these children apathetic. Like: apathetic children are being loaded onto airplanes and deported. Georgiâs doctor describes it as having fallen away from the world. Another doctor likened it to Michelangeloâs Pieta:
The official diagnosis is: resignation syndrome. It is, at this point, a condition specific to refugees in Sweden. Roma and Uyghur children are the most vulnerable.
A year passes. The Migration Board finally grants asylum to Georgi and his family. It is not like a moment of magnanimity suddenly opened up in the bureaucratic process, but Sweden was forced to reckon with the fact that their immigration policies were producing what amounted to living corpses.
Resignation syndrome could be viewed, maybe fallaciously, as an astounding form of protest. Maybe also, even more fallaciously, self-determination. Self-determination in the negative: self-extermination. Georgiâs family could not stay in Sweden, but they also did not want to go back to Russia. Their situation was absolutely precarious. Georgi was, in a sense, the expression of his familyâs precarious situation. His syndrome was sacrificial. But also: effigial. His condition occupied, or incarnated, concretized, the precarious transitional state into which he and his family had been plunged.
Georgi eventually emerged from his falling away from the world, and, regaining the ability to speak, described what had happened to him:
He said he felt like he was in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter.
The water would pour in and kill me, he said.
I understood that it wasnât real, he said. The glass wasnât real. But, at that time, it was very difficult, because every move could kill you.
The way he describes it makes it sound like a place. Neither Sweden nor Russia but a precarious transitional state between nation-states and national identities. Every move could kill you, I was living there: a state of exception. But personalized, applied on a person-to-person, or rather, refugee-to-refugee basis.
Here is a photo of Djeneta and Ibadeta, which maybe you recognize from the article:
Djeneta and Ibadeta are sisters from Kosovo. They are Roma. And they are refugees in Sweden. They are also living there, in resignation syndrome.
Self-determination in the form of self-sacrifice at the gates. Self-determination in the form of being sealed inside a glass box with fragile walls and plunged into the ocean. It sounds like a metaphor, but the refugee is describing where he was, where he went, and what he felt there.
In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi describes a certain type of phenomenal, or rather, anti-phenomenal, prisoner in Auschwitz, those prisoners who had completely surrendered their will to live. He calls them: the Muselmanner, the Muselmann.
Their life is short, but their number is endless, he writes; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
He goes on to say: All the Muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like the streams that run down to the sea.
The sea. Does the sea share, in any way, the substance of Georgiâs ocean? Georgi is in a glass box. The Muselmann is in bare life. No box, no glass, no mediation; the Muselmann stares out, blankly, with his body. And, as Levi writes, the Muselmannâs death is not death. Is that a way of saying they are dead before they die?
The Muselmann are shells. They are husks. They have so fully assimilated and been colonized by degradation and horror that they are beyond it. They have taken themselves out. It is unconscious. Theirs are preemptive corpses.
But they are also shadows: the shadows of those whose will to live, to survive, is still, despite everything, maintained. The shadows radiate insidious shame onto those who are still invested with the divine spark.
The Muselmann, Levi writes, was used to describe those doomed to selection.
Muselmann means, literally, Muslim.
Agamben writes in his essay, We Refugees: The refugee who has lost all rights, yet stops wanting to be assimilated at any cost to a new national identity so as to contemplate his condition lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain unpopularity, an inestimable advantage.
He goes on to remind us that the first camps in Europe were built as places to control refugees, and that the progressionâinternment camps, concentration camps, extermination campsârepresents a perfectly real filiation.
Agamben wrote that in Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced.
Corpses without death, he wrote; non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production. (Remnants of Auschwitz, page 72)
Serial production: you begin to imagine, in addition to the horrors of mass murder, the wheels of ingenuity turning and picking up speed to produce some kind of invention, some kind of ⊠product, and then that product, serially produced and indefinitely replicated, taking on a semblance of life, the semblance, the aura, of a kind of sentience or psyche or even humanity, with which human beings have the tendency, in their infinite madness, I mean sadness, to imbue even the most willfully inert and inorganic piece of garbage.
Because it is serial: it is perceived as being part of a clan, therefore communal.
Here is a photograph taken by one of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz:
The Sonderkommando were prisoners in the death camps who were given the task of disposing of the corpses. Mass graves were dug. The Sonderkommando dragged the dead out of the gas chambers and threw them into the graves. The Sonderkommando were Jews. The photograph was taken through the window of a gas chamber. Covertly. It is the fourth of four photos, and the only one in which no people are visible. The photographs were smuggled out in a tube of toothpaste.
According to Genocide Watch, genocide is a non-linear process comprised of 8 stages: classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial.
Japanese American incarceration fulfilled 7 of the 8 stage of genocide. All except for: extermination.
Does that mean that Japanese American incarceration was unfulfilled genocide?
Genocide was a word coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, referring to the systematic destruction of an ethnic group, the Jews by the Nazis. Destruction has come to mean, through that example, destruction by killing, though other meanings have included: destruction by dispersal.
Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at least, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart. Thatâs Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s. He had been commissioned by the French government to travel to the United States and study its prison system. He ended up writing Democracy in America.
People bristle when traumas or forms of oppression are talked about in conjunction with one another. As if it is more an act of comparison than stages on a non-linear continuum. But it feels important to go to the far ends of the continuum in order to see where things are situated.
I gave a talk on Inauguration Day at the Holocaust History Center in Tucson, Arizona. I talked about Japanese American incarceration in Arizona. Two of the largest camps were in Arizona, incarcerating 15,000 and 20,000 people, both on active Native reservations. The audience was comprised of Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated; an eighth grade class from the Paolo Freire school; poets and writers and friends and strangers; and lastly, Holocaust survivors.
I talked about how incarceration was not a military necessity, but an expression of white anxiety and rage. I talked about how it coincided with and directly influenced the policy of assimilation of Native Americans known as: termination. I talked about how it was a project of economic exploitation, how the Japanese Americans were instrumentalized in colonizing the west, indigenous lands in particular. And I talked about how it was a project to make legible, to the white imagination, a particular group of immigrants and their citizen children and grandchildren.
The Japanese were conceived of as an undifferentiated mass of untrustworthy aliens mindlessly aligned with the enemy. They were propagandized as vermin, vipers, cockroaches, rats, primitive, subhuman, at first, then, after Pearl Harbor, superhuman, though super- and sub- amount to the same thing: capable of infiltrating, by any means, the sanctity of clean (aka white) space, then multiplying and becoming uncontrollable.
An editorial in the February 2, 1942 Los Angeles Times stated: Perhaps the most difficult and delicate question that confronts our powers that be is the handlingâthe safe and proper treatmentâof our American-born Japanese, our Japanese-American citizens by the accident of birth. But who are Japanese nevertheless. A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.
Vipers, cockroaches and rats are excessive, but more importantly, un-exploitable. They trouble capitalization. They are useless. But, because they are also excessive, they are inflated as symbols of madness and abjection. Their very existence disrupted the narrative by which white Americans arranged their fantasies.
A brief note on the use of the possessive our:
Our American-born Japanese, our Japanese American citizens. When the camps were closed and the Japanese Americans were removed back to their communities, which, for many of them, were not the same communities they were forced to leave behind, the American people feigned compassion, sometimes even outrage, by repeating the possessive our:
It is a shame what happened to our Japanese friends and neighbors.
Pay close attention to the possessive our, and who is using it.
The Japanese American concentration camps were not death camps. But incarceration was a matter of serial production. The camps produced what I consider to be a socially significant kind of corpse. The camps produced: citizens. Even though 2/3 of those who were incarcerated were already citizens, their citizenship was conditional and probationary, as it was contingent upon the comprehension and benevolence of the dominant culture. But comprehension is capricious. And benevolence is mercurial. The dominant culture devised a way to convert the undifferentiated mass of untrustworthy aliens and vermin into legible, therefore usable, therefore controllable, capital. The conversion of human beings into human capital is synonymous with corpsification.
Citizenship is a particular kind of corpse: citizenship is effigial, that is: citizens are effigiesâeffigies of human beings and effigies of human being. Effigy: from the Latin for copy or imitation or likeness of someone or something, related to effingere, from ex-fingere: to mold, to shape, to finger:
The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was an attempt to mold, to shape, to finger, an effigy out of an entire ethnic population.
Related also to the Latin word for fiction.
Look at this effigy of Saint Victoria, and how much she resembles Jesus in Michelangeloâs Pieta:
And how they both resemble one of the sisters in Sweden:
And hereâs the effigy of Saint Francis Xavier, which resides in the mission cathedral in Tucson:
The mission is on the Tohono Oâodham reservation. Francis Xavier is known for being the first Jesuit missionary in Japan. Japan was called, by Xavierâs biographers, a vast chaos of superstition, which Xavier attempted to pacify and convert, to Christianity. He proselytized in Japan for two years, with little success.
Effigies are surrogates for human beings. They require belief, or at least, a suspension of disbelief.
Effigies are a rehabilitation of the corpse, because effigies, unlike corpses, possess functional personalities that radiate a kind of warmth by which its witnessesâincluding its progenitors and beneficiariesâfeel gratified. People can redeem themselves before effigies. Look at Xavier, for example, with his colorful blanket. He looks like he has a cold, like heâs taking a nap.
The conversion of human beings into human capital is serial production. It is a process. Exclusion, criminalization, eviction, incarceration; conversion, assimilation; reinstatement into fiction: citizen. The citizen, having proved itself through a series of testsâincluding pledges of allegiance, implicit vows to forsake language, culture, tradition, ancestry, mother and father and sister and twin sister, etc. in favor of an abstract, blanched, sovereign godâis then automatically enlisted to help run the machine by which the cycle perpetuates itself, ad infinitum.
Iâm not saying that citizenship is a fiction. Not entirely. But maybe the idea that my grandfather, would, by becoming a citizen, no longer have to anticipate the appearance of the FBI, was delusional. He did not create the delusion, but unconsciously or not, he colluded with it, by internalizing the ears and the eyes of the FBI. He became American, in the pejorative sense, which means, he un-became Japanese.
When reparations were paid out to the Japanese Americans (1990-1993), the first person to receive a check was Reverend Mamoru Eto, a 107 year-old first-generation man who was living in a nursing home in Los Angeles. He too was interrogated by the FBI. He too renounced his allegiance to Japan.
Weâre not Japanese anymore, he said. Weâre American.
Adding: Thereâs no other way.
James Baldwin, writing in 1964, called America a loveless nation. The best that can be said, he wrote, is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.
This is from his essay, Nothing Personal. In it, he talks about more general afflictions with which America, as a force of willfully obtuse and reckless inertia, suffers: ignorance, an inability to trust, the refusal to bear witness, the foreclosure of thinking and feeling, etc., all of which are emotional bankruptcies that are perfectly necessary to and appropriated by and encoded in the development and maintenance of a serial producing security state.
This doesnât have a happy ending. But Iâll punctuate the unhappy ending with a smile:
I used to sleep with this photo. A photocopy: I didnât hold it, I just placed it in my bed, under my pillow or under my head.
My grandfatherâs corpse, my grandfatherâs grave, my grandfatherâs effigy.
On his way to citizenship.
Here is what he was doing:
The prisoners (suspected Fifth Column terrorists) at Fort Missoula put on a play. Other prisoners, the guards, the staff, even the townspeople were invited. The men chose Madame Butterfly, a play originally set in Nagasaki, though more universally in the colonial imagination. A young United States Navy lieutenant falls in love with a fifteen year-old Japanese girl named Cho-Cho. My grandfather, the youngest prisoner, was chosen to play Cho-Cho. The Lieutenant asks Cho-Cho to marry him. She says yes. She converts to Christianity. When her family finds out, they denounce the marriage, and disown Cho-Cho, which only strengthens the bond between her and the Lieutenant. They marry and immediately after, the Lieutenant leaves for three years. Cho-Cho dutifully waits. One day a letter arrives: The Lieutenant has married an American woman. Cho-Cho writes back: But Iâve given birth to your child, you have to come back, I would rather die than be abandoned. The Lieutenant comes back, but with the American woman. They have come to take Cho-Choâs son. Cho-Cho never sees the Lieutenant, but meets the American woman, and reluctantly agrees to surrender her son. She gives her sonâher half white, half Japanese sonâan American flag, then takes a knife and slashes her throat.
